Luukas11 wrote:Thank you for your answers. Very simple way: you are like in the shop, take your number to the line. If I understood right you cannot take the number until doors are closed and break released. After that there are many things that impact situation like in this Hong Kong - Europe flight (different airspace - China, Russia and Europe). And you need to be little tricky so that you can count on arriving on time. You must know when to be ready to be in the line that everything goes as planned.
Doors should be shut with a tug connected to call ready, but some carriers call ready with the doors open and get caught out by ATC. It is a bit of a first in first served basis, it also depends on the initial cruising level you are after. If many aircraft are after the same cruising level ATC will delay you to have enroute separation. Some types have higher initial cruise altitudes than other so they have more choice of levels they can get assigned to get going. Normally I will just take any level to get going and then climb enroute. Chinese ATC will also reserve some levels for their own carriers, so when HKG calls them up other carriers are getting flow control, and Chinese carriers get no delay. HKG ATC does not play that game, if there is slot available, they tell China that the Chinese carrier does not get that slot and it goes the the next one in the HKG departure queue. Same happens going into HKG, I have been vectored way off track so that a Chinese carrier can hit the HKG FIR inbound point first and hence ahead in the HKG arrivals queue.
I must say this is not that unique to China, most of the countries in Asia will play the advantage card to the local carriers, except in HKG where it is first in the queue basis. HKG ATC will allow a carrier to swap departure/arrival slot in the queue with another aircraft from the same company. For example if the arrival queue had a CX aircraft as number 4 coming in from the east that is running early and has ample fuel, and say number 12 from the south was kept down below their planned levels for the whole flight and running tight on fuel, the operator in conjunction with ATC can swap the #12 with #4, it has no impact on others in the sequence. The #4 would get delayed to take the #12 slot, and the #12 would take the #4 slot.
The route between Europe and Hong Kong are also shared by the traffic to Japan, Korea, China etc, so the enroute delays may only become apparent when you get to Mongolia.
Airlines will have experience over the route on the time it needs to meet the arrival time, and builds "buffers" into the schedule so that flights would normally arrive on time.